Piwik Analytics Setup

Piwik is a free and open source web analytics application written by a team of international developers that runs on a PHP/MySQL webserver. Piwik is used by over 480,000 websites, 1.2% of all websites, and has been translated to more than 45 languages. New versions of Piwik are regularly released every few weeks.

Piwik tracks online visits to one or more websites and displays reports on these visits for analysis.

Piwik displays reports regarding the geographic location of visits, the source of visits (i.e. whether they came from a website, directly, or something else), the technical capabilities of visitors (browser, screen size, operating system, etc.), what the visitors did (pages they viewed, actions they took, how they left), the time of visits and more.

In addition to these reports, Piwik provides some other features that can help users analyze the data Piwik accumulates, such as:

Annotations — the ability to save notes (such as one’s analyses of data) and attach them to dates in the past.

Transitions — a feature similar to Click path-like features that allows one to see how visitors navigate a website, but different in that it only displays navigation information for one page at a time.

Goals — the ability to set goals for actions it is desired for visitors to take (such as visiting a page or buying a product). Piwik will track how many visits result in those actions being taken.

E-commerce — the ability to track if and how much people spend on a website.

Page Overlay — a feature that displays analytics data overlaid on top of a website.

Row Evolution — a feature that displays how metrics change over time within a report.

Custom Variables — the ability to attach data, like a user name, to visit data.

Piwik also provides features that are not directly related to analyzing web traffic, including:

Privacy Options — the ability to anonymize IP addresses, purge tracking data regularly (but not report data), opt-out support and Do Not Track support. In Germany, 13% of .de websites use Piwik because of these options.[6]

Scheduled Reports — reports sent regularly by e-mail or text message.

Log Importing — a script is also provided that imports data from web server logs.

the API — every report is accessible through a web API as well as almost every administrative function. Programs can be created to use this API.

the Mobile App — a free mobile app is provided so users can access their analytic data on their phone.

Though not strictly speaking a feature, Piwik also has the characteristic that users are the only people who see their own data. This is a by-product of Piwik being a self-hosted solution. Software as a service solutions (such as Google Analytics) on the other hand, have full access to the data users collect.

Piwik can also be integrated with many third-party apps including CMSes such as WordPress or Drupal, E-Commerce apps such as Magento or PrestaShop, bulletin board systems such as phpBB, and more.

The Piwik community has also created several plugins that can be used to augment Piwik. There are currently 20 third-party plugins.

Answers

What is Piwik?

Piwik is a downloadable, Free (GPL licensed) web analytics software package. It provides detailed reports on your website and its visitors, including the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, which pages they like, the files they downloadâ€¦ and so much more.
Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics.
Piwik is PHP MySQL software which you download and install on your own webserver. At the end of the 5-minute installation process you will be given a JavaScript tag. Simply copy and paste this tag on websites you wish to track (or use an existing plugin to do it automatically for you).

How is Piwik different to Google Analytics and other web analytics tools?

Piwik is the leading open source web analytics software, but there are dozens of other free and paid web analytics solutions; why choose Piwik?

One of the principle advantages of Piwik is that you are in control. Unlike remote-hosted services (such as Google Analytics), you host Piwik on your own server and the data is tracked inside your Mysql database. Because Piwik is installed on your server, you enjoy full control over your data. You can access the data easily via the Piwik APIs. Advanced users can use Custom Variables, Segmentation, or even run manual queries on the database in order to build advanced reports.

Piwik also protects your visitor privacy with advanced Privacy features. When using Piwik for Web Analytics, you ensure that your visitors behavior on your website(s) is not shared with advertising companies.

If you are using Google Analytics and starting to use Piwik, you can import your Google Analytics data history into Piwik. You can also use several web analytics tools at the same time so feel free to experiment!

To help you decide on a Web Analytics software, you might want to look at the list of features in Piwik or the online demo. Piwik offers nearly all features that other tools may offer, and also has some unique features such as Real Time visitor details, Ecommerce Analytics, and an awesome Mobile App.

Happy Analytics!

How does Piwik work?

Piwik has to be installed on a server with both PHP and MySQL. At the end of the 5-minute installation, Piwik will give you a Javascript tag which you add to the bottom of each page of your website. Piwik will then record the activity across your website within your database. Piwik aggregates this data to provide detailed web analytics reports about your visitors, page views, referrer information, search engine keywords, Ecommerce, campaigns and much more!

As well as tracking via the Javascript file, you can also import web server access logs into Piwik.

Is there an online demo available?

Yes, check out the online demo to see how awesome Piwik is!

If you prefer seeing the list of features all in one page, check out the list of features.

Can Piwik manage multiple user accounts?

In Piwik, you can create an infinite number of users and websites to track.
For each user, you can set permissions to “view”, “admin” or “no permission” for a specific website, or for all websites at once.

The permission system in Piwik is simple and makes it very easy to manage from a small number of websites and users to hundreds of websites and thousands of users. See the Manage Users documentation.

How do I track several websites, domains and multiple subdomains in Piwik?

You can add unlimited websites to track in Piwik, in the Admin Websites section. In fact, Piwik scales well to thousands of websites, and a few Piwik users are tracking even more. Each Website is defined by a URL. You can track sub domains in the same Piwik website, or you can create a different website for some of your subdomains. Learn more about creating Websites in the Managing websites page.

It is also important to configure First party cookie domains in the Javascript Tracking code. Please see the page Tracking code: Cookie configuration for sub-domains.

If you track many subdomains in the same Piwik website, you might want to have the domain name appear on your Page Title reports: “support.example.org/Homepage” rather than “Homepage”, check out the JS setDocumentTitle documentation.
In the Admin Websites page, you can also define for each website a list of Alias URLs which contains all the other domains and subdomains that will be tracked. This will ensure they don’t appear in your “Referer” reports.

If you track more than 10 websites, the Website selector will display the first ten sites only, and show a search field where you can search quickly to look at another website. Check out the ‘All Websites’ dashboard as well, a very useful first page to look at for a quick overview of the performance yesterday or last week or all your sites. You can even make it your defaut page to load in Piwik in your user settings.
See also: Install Piwik on one server and track visits on websites that are hosted on other servers.
The official Piwik Mobile App supports all these reports, including the ‘All Websites’ dashboard.

How do I define and track Goal conversions?

You can add unlimited number of Goals to track in Piwik (newsletter subscription, file download, ‘thank you’ page, etc.). Learn more about how to track your website Goals in the Goal Tracking documentation.

How do I improve accuracy of visitors’ Country detection, and enable Cities and Regions tracking?

By default Piwik uses the browser language to determine location. To improve accuracy of country detection (and enable Region and City tracking), go to Piwik > Settings > Geo Location. Then, you can select the appropriate solution for your install. These include GEOIP database from Maxmind (for shared hosting) or a server side solutions such as GeoIP Apache or GeoIP PECL modules. Learn more about Visitors geo location in Piwik.

How do I track Ecommerce orders, details of purchased products and abandoned carts on my website?

How does Piwik ensure Privacy of my Analytics data, and Privacy of my website Visitors?

Piwik is the ideal Web Analytics software that respects Privacy, thanks to its Free/Libre software nature and useful Privacy settings, setting it apart from other commercial tools such as Google analytics. To ensure and respect your visitors Privacy, you can:
1) automatically anonymize Visitors IPs,
2) include a Web Analytics opt-out feature on your site (using a simple iframe), and
3) Delete old visitors logs.
To configure Privacy features in Piwik, log in as a Super User, click “Settings” then click “Privacy”.
Learn more about Piwik, Data & Users Privacy.

How does Piwik track downloads?

On many websites, you want to track when visitors download your brochure, a photo, a software, etc. Piwik automatically track these clicks as Downloads, and reports them under Actions > Downloads.
Piwik will automatically detect a download as a click on a link that ends with one of the following file extensions: 7z, aac, arc, arj, asf, asx, avi, bin, bz, bz2, csv, deb, dmg, doc, exe, flv, gif, gz, gzip, hqx, jar, jpg, jpeg, js, mp2, mp3, mp4, mpg, mpeg, mov, movie, msi, msp, odb, odf, odg, odp, ods, odt, ogg, ogv, pdf, phps, png, ppt, qt, qtm, ra, ram, rar, rpm, sea, sit, tar,
tbz, tbz2, tgz, torrent, txt, wav, wma, wmv, wpd, xls, xml, z, zip.
You can also force Piwik to count a click as a download by using a specific CSS class for this link. Check out the section “Force a click on a link to be recorded as a download in Piwik” in the Javascript tagging Guide.

What are Outlinks, Clicks or Unique clicks?

The Piwik report “Pages > Outlinks” shows the list of external URLs that were clicked by your visitors from your website pages. Piwik will track as an “outlink” all clicks on URLs that are not the same domain as the website being tracked. For example, if your visitor click on a link to “piwik.org” on your website “example.org”, this will be counted as an outlink in the report.

For each outlink, Piwik will report the number of clicks, and the number of unique clicks. Unique clicks are the number of unique visitors that clicked to a given domain ; for example, if the same visitor clicked 3 times on the same outlink, it will be reported as 3 clicks and 1 unique click.

Note that Piwik is not able to track Javascript of flash links. Only HTML links are tracked, eg. <a href='http://linkedin.com'>LinkedIn Profile</a>

If you wish to not track clicks on your subdomains as outlinks, for example if your website is “example.org/” and you don’t want to track outlinks to “news.example.org”, you can use the Javascript function setDomains(). Read more in the documentation.

By default, Piwik only tracks visitors with Javascript enabled. See more information about the tracking process.

If you want to track visitors (or bots) without Javascript, you can add an Image Tracker on your pages. Advanced users can also use the Advanced Image Tracker or even call the Piwik Tracking API using HTTP. Check out more information on how to use these advanced tracking techniques in the Piwik Tracking API. See also How do I enable tracking for visitors without Javascript?

You can also use Piwik to track Search Engine Bots. For this you will need access to your web server access log files, which you can import in Piwik along with Search Engine Bots Traffic information.

Can I use Piwik and Google Analytics / Yahoo! Analytics / WebTrends etc. at the same time?

Yes, you can use any combination of analytics packages at the same time on your pages. The downside is that your pages might take longer to load as each analytics Javascript tracking code will add some delay to the page load. We also recommend putting the Piwik Tracking code first, above other javascript codes, just before the </body>. Read more about the Piwik Javascript Tracking API

How do I know when new versions are released?

The Piwik Changelog page lists all recent Piwik versions and the list of changes. The best way to keep track of all new versions is to subscribe to the Changelog Rss Feed.

To stay tuned about the latest Piwik developments, you can try the Piwik blog (by rss or email – see the sidebar of the blog) or register with the piwik-hackers mailing list (more info in the developer section). Also, when a new version is released, your Piwik will display a message inviting you to update to the latest version.

Where can I get support?

If you’re looking for help, please read the FAQs, the Documentation, or search piwik.org. If you can’t find the answer you’re looking for, please post a message in the Piwik Forums, where you can get help from the community.

If you need professional support, you can contact one of the official Piwik Consultants or learn more about Piwik Consulting.

How much does Piwik cost?

Piwik is a Free Software, released under the GPL license. It does not have a monetary cost (it is free of charge) and the software license ensures it respects your freedom to use and modify the software.

If you would like to pay back a little something, you are welcome to participate in the project and spend some of your time and energy to make Piwik better (the app, website or docs). We are grateful for our wonderful sponsors and the core Piwik team for their amazing work.

Is there any Data Limit in Piwik? Is it possible to keep all historical data?

Please See our Piwik Data Limits Fact Sheet for more information about Data Limits and Historical Data records. In general, Piwik does not believe in any limits, and will only be limited with the server resources.

If you have access to existing data, you can also transfer it to Piwik. In particular, you can import old historical visitors data in Piwik, or import data from Google Analytics.

Piwik will automatically track visits on mobile phones that use browsers executing Javascript: iOs based devices such as iPhone and iPad, Android based phones or any other modern devices (running Palm Pre, Opera Mobile, Webkit, Mozilla Fennec, etc.).

For low-end mobile devices that use browsers which do not execute Javascript, you can manually record visits using the Piwik Tracking API. Learn more about the Piwik Tracking API.

See also Does Piwik track visitors without Javascript? .

Can I use Piwik and provide analytics Hosting service? What are the requirements for Piwik Hosted as a service?

It is allowed to re-sell Piwik and provide it for free, or for a fee.

In fact, we maintain a list of Official Hosting Piwik partners which we recommended.

If you are providing a service reusing Piwik, you must also reuse the word Piwik with care. Please see the Piwik Trademark page for more details about how to reuse the name Piwik in your modified version of Piwik. In particular, it is not allowed to use Piwik in the URL domain name.

Can I rebrand or sell or reuse or re-license or include Piwik in my product, company, or website?

Reusing Piwik in any way is allowed as long as you respect the GPL license.
If your product, software, or website uses Piwik but all the code (including your modifications) stays within your company or server, you have the freedom to keep your code and not be bound to the GPL License. For example, you can change the header and footer to reflect your brand, change the colors, or add new features on your copy of Piwik.
If you distribute a modified version of Piwik, or software that includes Piwik as a module, or develop a website for a customer/client that includes Piwik, you must give access to the code source and publish all the code under the GPL.
Plugins Licenses: Individual components, libraries or plugins may be available for reuse under a different license. Please refer to the LEGALNOTICE file included in the distribution.
You may want to learn more about the GPL License and look at the GPL FAQ.
As well as respecting the GPL license, you must also reuse the word Piwik with care. Please see the Piwik Trademark page for more details about how to reuse the name Piwik in your modified version of Piwik.
Finally, if you modify Piwik and add new features or fix existing bugs, please submit your patches back to the Piwik team: together we will build the best Free/Libre web analytics software!

Does Piwik work on high traffic websites? What is the performance like with millions of pages views per month?

Piwik can scale to millions of page views per month and/or to thousands of registered websites. If you have a few hundreds visits/page views per day, Piwik should work fine “out of the box”.

Can I customize the Piwik logo in the reports, emails and login screen?

To upload a Custom Logo in Piwik, login as the Super User, click on Settings > General Settings > Branding, and click on “Use a custom logo”.

Can I get the data from the Piwik API web services and publish, reuse, process this data in a non GPL software?

Yes, the data coming from the Piwik API belongs to you and is not covered by the GPL. You can use Piwik as a service, and reuse, publish, display, modify, process the data coming from the Piwik API using the REST web service call – this is not allowed if you call the API when using Piwik as a PHP library (see how to call the API?).

Does Piwik work in a load balanced environment? How do I setup Piwik for high scale tracking?

Many medium-high traffic websites successfully use Piwik to track and analyse their website behavior and performance.

If you want to provide high reliability and better performance in your Piwik setup, you can load balance Piwik services on various servers. It is pretty easy to do so, but make sure you read the following documentation.

config/config.ini.php is used by every request to Piwik. It contains db access, plugins enabled, various settings, etc.
The file is only modified when the Super User changes some settings in the Admin interface (plugins, super user password, smtp settings, etc.). This file must be synchronized on every Piwik server.

by default, Piwik uses file session storage, which are usually stored in tmp/sessions, or in the global sessions directory (see php.ini).
There is a config setting to enable database session storage.

When Piwik is used behind a load balancer, here are the steps to follow:

1) synchronize config/config.ini.php on all servers – make sure the file config/config.ini.php is the same on all servers (using rsync for example).

2) setup a cron to delete the tracker cache every 5 minutes on all servers: rm piwik/tmp/cache/tracker/*

3) enable database session storage

4) we highly recommend to enable SSL in Piwik

Piwik should then work as expected in a load balanced environment.
For example, a common way to load balance Piwik on 3 servers: Load balancer in front of (2x) webservers which are tracking/querying the (1x) Master mysql DB server. For further optimization, a (1x) UI webserver can be added, to handle all API requests, UI requests, and run the cron archiving. This server can also be doubled and load balanced.

Typically, webserver boxes would be cheap to operate servers, and the Master DB server would be bigger (eg. multiple cores, 8G memory, fast disk access), which could scale to a certain point (1M+ pages per day).

Where does the name Piwik come from?

When working on the first version of Piwik, Matthieu was looking for a name that was unique, easy to write and to remember, with as few letters as possible, and for which the domain name was still available. After a few hours of deliberation and creativity, the name Piwik was born out of Matt’s imagination.

The name ‘Piwik’ does not have a particular meaning, but we are on a mission: “To create, as a community, the leading international open source web analytics platform, that gives users full control of their data.”

How do I pronounce Piwik?

If you’re wondering how to say ‘Piwik’, you can find out by clicking play.

Who is the team behind Piwik?

Piwik is a Free/Libre collaborative effort with many people contributing to the project to make Piwik what it is today. Visit the Piwik Team page to view profiles.
You can also be part of the Piwik project! We need help to build the best open source web analytics software, and there are many ways to help whether you are a Piwik user, a developer, a marketing fan, a blogger, or if your native language is not English and you want to translate the software. Check out the How to Contribute? page.

Disclaimer: These F.A.Q’s have been taken from the official Piwik Website and ALL Credits goes to the original Author

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